Google Buzz to be Killed

Google has decided to kill Google Buzz, the social messaging platform, according to its blog post last week.

Google Buzz was launched in February 2010 as a way to share status updates, photos, videos and links with friends through Gmail. It also mined users' Gmail contacts. It helped users automatically follow the people they emailed the most.

However, for Google, this turned out to be a privacy nightmare. Users' follower lists were made public by default, revealing their most frequent email contacts to the world. Google Buzz also lacked a way to block people who didn't have public profiles at first.

Google is now focusing its social networking efforts on Google+, a three and a half-month-old service that has been catching on quickly.

Google+ already has more than 40 million users, and Google CEO Larry Page seems confident that it will become an effective weapon for fighting the threat posed by Facebook and its audience of 800 million users. When Google+ was launched in June, Google Buzz was certain to be closed down.

This is not the first time that Google has announced product execution. On June 24, Google announced the shutdown of Google Health and Google PowerMeter. On Sept. 2, Google said it would discontinue 10 other products, including Aardvark, Google Desktop and Google Notebook.

Google product vice president Bradley Horowitz wrote on the company's blog: We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.

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